I know a good many men of great learning—that is, men born with an
extraordinary eagerness and capacity to acquire knowledge. One and all,
they tell me that they can’t recall learning anything of any value in
school. All that schoolmasters managed to accomplish with them was
to test and determine the amount of knowledge that they had already
acquired independently—and not infrequently the determination was made
clumsily and inaccurately. In my own nonage I had a great desire to
acquire knowledge in certain limited directions, to wit, those of the
physical sciences. Before I was ever permitted, by the regulations of
the secondary seminary I was penned in, to open a chemistry book I had
learned a great deal of chemistry by the simple process of reading the
texts and then going through the processes described. When, at last,
I was introduced to chemistry officially, I found the teaching of
it appalling. The one aim of that teaching, in fact, seemed to be to
first purge me of what I already knew and then refill me with the same
stuff in a formal, doltish, unintelligible form. My experience with
physics was even worse. I knew nothing about it when I undertook its
study in class, for that was before the days when physics swallowed
chemistry. Well, it was taught so abominably that it immediately became
incomprehensible to me, and hence extremely; distasteful, and to this
day I know nothing about it. Worse, it remains unpleasant to me, and so
I am shut off from the interesting and useful knowledge that I might
otherwise acquire by reading.
One extraordinary teacher I remember who taught me something: a teacher
of mathematics. I had a dislike for that science, and knew little about
it. Finally, my neglect of it brought me to bay: in transferring from
one school to another I found that I was hopelessly short in algebra.
What was needed, of course, was not an actual knowledge of algebra,
but simply the superficial smattering needed to pass an examination.
The teacher that I mention, observing my distress, generously offered
to fill me with that smattering after school hours. He got the whole
year’s course into me in exactly six lessons of half an hour each.
And how? More accurately, why? Simply because he was an algebra
fanatic—because he believed that algebra was not only a science of
the utmost importance, but also one of the greatest fascination. He
was the penmanship professor of years ago, lifted to a higher level.
A likable and plausible man, he convinced me in twenty minutes that
ignorance of algebra was as calamitous, socially and intellectually,
as ignorance of table manners—that acquiring its elements was as
necessary as washing behind the ears. So I fell upon the book and
gulped it voraciously, greatly to the astonishment of my father,
whose earlier mathematical teaching had failed to set me off because
it was too pressing—because it bombarded me, not when I was penned
in a school and so inclined to make the best of it, but when I had
got through a day’s schooling, and felt inclined to play. To this
day I comprehend the binomial theorem, a very rare accomplishment in
an author. For many years, indeed, I was probably the only American
newspaper editor who knew what it was.
Two other teachers of that school I remember pleasantly as fellows
whose pedagogy profited me—both, it happens, were drunken and
disreputable men. One taught me to chew tobacco, an art that has done
more to give me an evil name, perhaps, than even my Socinianism. The
other introduced me to Shakespeare, Congreve, Wycherly, Marlowe and
Sheridan, and so filled me with that taste for coarseness which now
offends so many of my customers, lay and clerical. Neither ever
came to a dignified position in academic circles. One abandoned
pedagogy for the law, became involved in causes of a dubious nature,
and finally disappeared into the shades which engulf third-rate
attorneys. The other went upon a fearful drunk one Christmastide,
got himself shanghaied on the water-front and is supposed to have
fallen overboard from a British tramp, bound east for Cardiff. At all
events, he has never been heard from since. Two evil fellows, and
yet I hold their memories in affection, and believe that they were
the best teachers I ever had. For in both there was something a good
deal more valuable than mere pedagogical skill and diligence, and
even more valuable than correct demeanor, and that was a passionate
love of sound literature. This love, given reasonably receptive soil,
they knew how to communicate, as a man can nearly always communicate
whatever moves him profoundly. Neither ever made the slightest effort
to “teach” literature, as the business is carried on by the usual idiot
schoolmaster. Both had a vast contempt for the textbooks that were
official in their school, and used to entertain the boys by pointing
out the nonsense in them. Both were full of derisory objections to the
principal heroes of such books in those days: Scott, Irving, Pope, Jane
Austen, Dickens, Trollope, Tennyson. But both, discoursing in their
disorderly way upon heroes of their own, were magnificently eloquent
and persuasive. The boy who could listen to one of them intoning
Whitman and stand unmoved was a dull fellow indeed. The boy who could
resist the other’s enthusiasm for the old essayists was intellectually
deaf, dumb and blind.
I often wonder if their expoundings of their passions and prejudices
would have been half so charming if they had been wholly respectable
men, like their colleagues of the school faculty. It is not likely. A
healthy boy is in constant revolt against the sort of men who surround
him at school. Their puerile pedantries, their Christian Endeavor
respectability, their sedentary pallor, their curious preference for
the dull and uninteresting, their general air of so many Y. M. C. A.
secretaries—these things infallibly repel the youth who is above
milksoppery. In every boys’ school the favorite teacher is one who
occasionally swears like a cavalryman, or is reputed to keep a jug in
his room, or is known to receive a scented note every morning. Boys are
good judges of men, as girls are good judges of women. It is not by
accident that most of them, at some time or other, long to be cowboys
or ice-wagon drivers, and that none of them, not obviously diseased
in mind, ever longs to be a Sunday-school superintendent. Put that
judgment to a simple test. What would become of a nation in which all
of the men were, at heart, Sunday-school superintendents—or Y. M. C.
A. secretaries, or pedagogues? Imagine it in conflict with a nation
of cowboys and ice-wagon drivers. Which would be the stronger, and
which would be the more intelligent, resourceful, enterprising and
courageous?